Who Watches The Watchmen?

I’m preoccupied by the idea of corporations becoming more powerful than nations and turning into the de facto power-brokers to whom governments defer. An interesting discussion of this was had on Start The Week, Mon 27^th May with Google CEO Eric Schmidt during which, telingly, he twice referred to Google as a country.

One of the most significant developments in this power-shift is that it’s not so much the industrial complex (oil, defence) which has the influence now; as we’re seeing with rising concerns over civil liberties and supposedly democratic governments’ frantic efforts to co-opt the information that Google, etc., have on their clients, it’s the owners of digital information that are inheriting, almost inadvertently, potentially huge influence, unfettered by considerations of constitution or sovereignty.  

‘When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise - to deny the political character of the modern corporation - is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise.’
- JK Gilbraith

I stumbled on a really interesting hypothesis for the origin of this phenomenon in an LRB Review (34:21) of Steve Coll’s Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Luke Mitchell. Coll postulates that ‘The Cold War’s end signalled a coming era when non-governmental actors – corporations, philanthropies, terrorist cells and media networks – all gained relative power.’

We are no longer in the era when relativism and indeterminacy are confined to the walled gardens of academe. This stuff just got real. Absolutes are dissolving at every level. People no longer defer to the owners and publishers of ideas, music and books for their conception of value. Governments no longer sleep easy at night for fear of their spies, their soldiers or their supposed friends leaking evidence of their wrongdoings. We’ve renounced the old Renaissance idea of individual genius for something more inclined to valuing imitation and adaptation, of refitting a narrative to suit the times we’re living through.

I’ve never seen such massive contradictions: great for creativity, but terrible for creators; great for democracy, but equally good for tyrants. We’re seeing people rise up all over the world on behalf of democracy, feminism, social justice and an end to disproportionate privilege, whilst the governments of the world simultaneously deploy their favoured techniques (economic reforms and covert surveillance for the allegedly civilised democratic governments, rape, torture, murder and censorship for the rest) to coax their populations into quiescent silence once again.